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Welcome back, readers of The Breakdown. Today’s newsletter is about a public health story in the news—partly to explain what’s happening, partly to dig into what it says about the damage Donald Trump has done to some of our most important agencies and programs.
A challenge in this article—and, really, in many of the articles I write—is trying to strike the right tone. I don’t want to be alarmist. And I don’t want to minimize real dangers. My solution is to do as much reporting as I can—talking to whomever I can get on the phone, reading whatever I can get my hands on—and to let the facts speak for themselves as much as possible.
It’s what I like to do. I’m a reporter, after all! But it’s also a labor-intensive effort, the kind that would not be possible without the support of our Bulwark+ members. I hope you’ll consider becoming one yourself. On the fence? Find out whether Bulwark+ is right for you with a two-week trial membership for FREE by clicking here:
–Jonathan
But Seriously, How Nervous Should We Be About Hantavirus?
What I’m hearing from experts about the outbreak—and the state of our biothreat readiness under Donald Trump.
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IT SOUNDS LIKE the premise of a horror film.
A small ship is making its way across the South Atlantic, ferrying roughly 150 tourists to explore remote lands and glimpse rare birds, when an older man suddenly develops fever and a cough—and dies. Symptoms quickly appear in a half dozen more passengers and crew, including the ship’s doctor, and soon the death count is up to three. Testing reveals they’ve been stricken with an animal-borne virus that can infect humans, but that in most forms does not jump from person to person.
By this point, more than 30 passengers have already disembarked and scattered across a dozen countries, setting off a mad scramble by health authorities to find and isolate them. Meanwhile, the rest are still on the boat—also isolated, and under the watchful eyes of newly arrived medical staff observing to see who else will develop this disease for which there is no cure.
If you’ve been following the headlines, you know this isn’t fiction. It’s the story of a hantavirus outbreak aboard MV Hondius, an expedition vessel that set sail from Argentina in April. And the good news—yes, there’s good news—is that this tale isn’t likely to have a horror-film ending, at least on a mass scale.
The form of hantavirus known to be transmissible among humans is thought to spread for a relatively short period as symptoms appear, and primarily through prolonged, close-up contact.¹ That’s very different from, for example, COVID, which was airborne and which people could spread before they even realized they had the virus. With hantavirus, contact tracing has a better chance of catching up to people who might have been exposed—most of whom, in turn, are unlikely to contract the disease.²
“We have contained this in the past and I’m very confident it’s going to be contained again,” Katelyn Jetelina, a former CDC consultant who founded and writes for the newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist, told me in an interview. “To the average person, your risk is essentially nil.”
But if you talk to people who work in public health, you will pick up a clear level of concern. And it’s not simply because the spread of any lethal virus is, quite rightly, a reason for them to be vigilant.
They know that Donald Trump has spent much of his second presidency waging an all-out assault on America’s global health infrastructure—by downsizing or eliminating existing agencies and programs, and transforming them in ways that make them instruments of other goals like extracting mineral rights or ending DEI. This assault has also included withdrawing from the World Health Organization, and from global health cooperation more generally.
That has left the federal government without some of the tools, systems, and personnel it has deployed in the past. The result is a federal response to outbreaks that is weaker overall, and could falter in the face of a more serious threat.
HANTAVIRUS IS A DISEASE CARRIED mainly by rodents. Estimates suggest it infects tens of thousands of people worldwide each year, which sounds like a lot until you remember more than eight billion people live on this planet.
The majority of cases come from Europe and Asia, where the common strains can cause renal failure. The versions in the Americas usually cause respiratory problems, and are more likely to kill. What these variants have in common is that transmission for the majority of observed strains takes place through one method: Somebody inhales particles of rodent excrement that have accumulated in dust or are floating in the air.
That is why the few cases³ that pop up in the United States frequently come from people who didn’t wear masks while cleaning out old attics or basements, or from people who were living in places that turned out to have rodent infestations. This is what officials believe killed the wife of actor Gene Hackman last year (leaving the ailing Hackman without a caretaker).
One of the few versions of hantavirus known to be capable of transmission among people is the